Austin Powers 2 : Welcome To My Underground Lair! Review

Pure Evil!

Very drole

You see, "Austin Powers : Welcome To My Underground Lair!" is a collection of sub-games, sound clips and other miscellaneous film-related scraps, which is then vaguely disguised as a "game". All of which is held together with the premise that you are booting up some form of Dr Evil operating system called "Evil 2000" (naturally running on top of EvilDOS).

The tedium starts when you first turn the Gameboy on and see a familiar black screen with white text performing a fake memory check. At this point alarm bells started ringing in my head, and they seemed to continue until I turned the machine off again. After you leave it running for well over a minute to get through all the splash screens and pseudo-loading sequences, you can finally get into the meat of the game...

What Was I Doing Today?™

A desktop, yesterday

A screen is displayed with a set of icons, a background wallpaper, a mouse pointer, and the Dr Evil equivalent of the immensely irritating paperclip helper from Microsoft Word. You guessed it, this is Evil 2000 in all its glory! From here users have the option to select programs, games or to change some settings.

Staring back at me was a picture of Mr Bigglesworth, Dr Evil's hairless kittie, so I decided to change the background wallpaper to make the game feel more like home. After looking at the initally impressive sounding selection of available wallpapers, I soon discovered that they were mainly just variations on each other, so I selected one of the least optically assaulting and soldiered on. Other customisable elements include changing the colour scheme, the cursors and screen savers. As you would expect, the screen saver kicks in after 30 seconds of inactivity and displays some variation on a Windows screensaver.

The programs are a collection of small applications which serve no useful purpose. The Evil Launch Pad is a kind of word processing program in which you can painstakingly tap out messages and notes using the D-Pad. After you have finished doing this you have the option of printing it out using a Gameboy Printer, or transferring it to another owner of the game via the infra-red port. By far the worst feature though is the "Internet" option, which is just a few pages of limited information on some of the characters from the film, with hyperlinks interconnecting them.

You can even use the "Frickulator", which does basic mathematical operations, with all the functions you would expect of a standard calculator. Like the rest of these programs though, it is very awkward to use .. as you would expect from a Gameboy interface. For example, performing a simple calculation using the Frickulator takes several minutes to load up the Gameboy and get to the actual program. Which isn't much good for a bit of quick multiplication.

Game On!

Exciting, isn't it?

I was hoping for something much more exciting to be included in the games folder, which includes "Rock, Paper, Scissors", "Domination", "Mojo Maze" and the main game "'Kin' Evil".

Rock, Paper, Scissors is exactly what you would expect - you select to play your move as either rock, paper or scissors, and have to hit the B button at the right time to play. After you have done this a certain number of times the game is over. If you really had the desire, you could link up two Gameboys and play with a friend, but I really wouldn't recommend it as you might as well just play the game the traditional way.

Domination is essentially the classic board game Othello, in which you have to change the colour of an opponent's pieces by placing a counter on each side of theirs. This game is actually quite bearable, and entertained me for some time purely because I have always liked to play the original. However, the CPU player is never really on the ball, and as such you win frequently. The game also shows you all of the valid moves on each turn, which is a let down in itself as it takes all the skill out of the game. Despite its simplistic nature though, Domination is one of the best features in the entire cart, if only so that you can see Dr Evil say "I'm hip!" when you do a particularly good move.

Evil Empire

Kin Evil

Mojo Maze is a blatant Pac-Man rip off, but is also the most entertaining thing in the whole game. You control Dr Evil himself on a run around variously themed mazes, collecting symbols made up of the Evil Empire logo and being chased by ghosts. If you need to kill the ghosts you can grab canisters of Mojo and go on a rampage, swallowing them up before they change back. It's all very familiar but fun all the same, especially as each level consists of four different sections which you can unlock after you have cleared the first one, using previously finished sections as escape routes from the ghosts.

Finally, you have 'Kin' Evil, which is almost a direct copy of Gameboy Color game Evil Kinevil, and it even goes as far as to be as diabolical to play as well. You have to control Dr Evil and Mini-Me as they drive through levels of jumps and loops in their bike (as seen in the film). The slightest touch on an overhead piece of masonry dramatically reduces your energy bar, and when you flip the bike you automatically die. And to get to the end of a level you must go fairly fast, which in turn makes the control system change into a horribly unresponsive mess. Although I suppose 'Kin' Evil is the main game on the cart, it is also the most frustrating to play.

Conclusion

Nobody should be subjected to such a lame cash-in for a film. To demonstrate this fact, you can also buy "Austin Powers : Oh Behave!", which is much the same content but with Austin related graphics and a differing main game - all of the other elements like the Mojo Maze are still in place. In fact, other than the mildly entertaining mini-games of Domination and Mojo Maze, the game's only redeeming feature is the digitised sound effects from the film which they managed to cram on to the cart, although they sound very muffled through the single mono speaker. Steer well clear.